Testing Plays Critical Role in Australia's Largest Contact Center

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Testing Plays Critical Role in Australia’s Largest Contact Center Consolidation, Virtualization Success at National Australia Bank

NAB USES CYARA SUITE IN National Australia Bank is one of the four services at NAB. “They were all on disparate AUSTRALIA’S LARGEST largest financial institutions in Australia. The platforms. None of them could really talk to CONTACT CENTER business banking division provides a full one another effectively, so we couldn't do load spectrum of commercial services to customers balancing or virtualization across that group VIRTUALIZATION ranging from small businesses to Australia's readily.” largest corporations. Personal Banking PROJECT provides high-quality financial products and 36 CUSTOMER CONTACT CENTERS MOVE TO services to retail and small business customers ONE CENTRALIZED, VIRTUALIZED PLATFORM through a variety of distribution channels and In early 2010, NAB seized the opportunity to brands, including NAB, Homeside and UBank. put themselves ahead of the pack and NAB's Wholesale Banking division provides a re-platform their core banking infrastructure. range of funding, risk management and They embarked on a two-year, internally investment solutions to business, personal and dubbed Virtual Contact Center Infrastructure wealth clients. (VCCI) project which is today seen as one of the largest, virtual contact center consolida- CUTTINGEDGE BUSINESS STRATEGIES tion projects worldwide with 36 contact LIMITED BY AGING TECHNOLOGY STACK centers running Genesys contact center Prior to 2010, NAB provided service in 36 software over a Cisco IP infrastructure and "Cyara gave us contact centers across Australia. The operating as a single, virtual platform. certainty in knowing organization’s contact center infrastructure, which grew as the company grew in part The result is a fully-leveraged technology what we had through acquisition, was operating on nine investment, streamlined operating model and designed; our different networks and on aging, legacy, a consolidated regional infrastructure address- diverse IVR and telephony platforms; multiple ing the needs of NAB and other brands within intended customer buildings housed different technologies and National Australia Bank Group (the Group). experience could functioned as operational silos. “The cost of implementing in a piecemeal now be verified, not NAB’s end goal was a more cost-effective, approach in each location was basically about flexible, customer-centric environment. the same price as it was to centralize onto a from us looking out, Opportunities in new mobile technologies, Cisco platform within our data center and but from the business strategies involving collaboration and consolidate all of the applications onto a a push for the lower support and maintenance consistent platform across the Group,” says customer-looking-in costs inherent in a single technology stack Cronin. viewpoint.” were main drivers dictating the move to a consolidated, centralized, virtual platform for “This gives us redundancy across the Group, Graham Cronin NAB’s contact center infrastructure. but also allows us the flexibility to move call centers wherever we want. We're not now Head of Network Services “We had about nine major points of contact bound by bricks and mortar due to location, center infrastructure across the group,” says where points of infrastructure are,” he explains. Graham Cronin, head of contact center

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REDUCING THE RISK OF CUSTOMER SERVICE Cyara Pulse™, which monitors customer IMPACT WITH AUTOMATED TESTING experience by periodically placing calls into Cronin likens such an infrastructure overhaul the contact center and alerting using to “conducting maintenance on a jumbo jet SMS/email, placed calls into each business "I like Cyara because while it's still in the air.” The business units unit over a two-month period to gain accurate the business likes must continue to operate as needed, and results. Business units were categorized into customer experience goals must be met. major and minor based upon call volume and Cyara.” strategic business importance from a contact NAB had previous success with Cyara in 2009, center perspective. Common, high volume, Graham Cronin using Cyara for testing when first introducing critical-to-the business call flows were identi- Head of Network Services speech recognition and voice biometrics into fied in consultation with the business for each the company. And when NAB began the VCCI of the business units. project, Cyara was brought in again to reduce risk and save on testing costs. “We did some testing and monitoring originally on the old legacy systems and the Today NAB uses the entire suite of Cyara’s legacy routing, so we had a benchmark from premise-based offerings for customer and which to work from and that uncovered some agent testing of speech, voice biometrics, CTI, interesting call flows that didn't meet our call routing, outbound, load and regression compliance requirements consistently,” says testing and post-deployment monitoring. Cronin.

“There's a whole element of enlightenment that came from that benchmarking, “he adds, “and it also gave us good perspective on what HP QUALITY CENTER CRM DESKTOP the customer experience had been that none ADAPTER of us were actually aware of because nobody

VOICE QUALITY TESTING END-TO-END ROUTING TESTING had the capacity to actually actively test the IVR and the call distribution flows effectively CRUNCHER REPLAY PULSE OUTBOUND CONTACT AGENT Load Testing IVR Application Customer Dialer Testing CENTER AUDIO through their organization.” Testing Experience CTI Testing Emulates, Tests Monitoring Agent Endpoints “Cyara is also allowing us to go back and gain CYARA PLATFORM insight into customer experience on a regular (Unified Test Case Management, Reporting, Campaign Management, Administration) basis and understand, from a customer's perspective, the service impact of using our

HOSTED PREMISE technology,” says Cronin.

FROM MANUAL TO AUTOMATED TESTING AND THE BENEFIT OF A CENTRAL REPOSI BENCHMARKING BY CYARA REVEALS STATUS TORY TO DOCUMENT CHANGE PROCESS OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE TO THE BUSINESS In addition to pre-migration benchmark Cyara provided pre- and post-migration testing, Cyara was also used for load testing baselines for the VCCI project. The goal was to and functional testing of systems and applica- obtain an objective, quantitative and measur- tions. Like many companies, NAB does able view of customer experience across the technical testing on their contact center various business units. NAB then used these infrastructure to ensure systems are working as metrics as a baseline for performance testing they should along with user acceptance to gain insight into the performance of the testing (UAT), which ensures the business existing contact center environment. accepts the changes made to the systems such as when new service phone numbers or new scripts for an IVR self-service function are added.

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Much of the testing at NAB prior to VCCI was Cronin also stresses Cyara’s ability to deliver done manually by individuals within each of insights into complex environments such as the call centers, says Cronin. “Effectively, we NAB’s and to work agnostically with multiple were creating test cases from scratch, which is vendor offerings. “It wasn't just one thing that labor-intensive, and that's one of several areas we stuck in and switched on; It was actually where Cyara was very helpful.” about a dozen or more components that had to work together, seamlessly, and deliver the “Cyara automates that testing,” he adds. Prior customer experience that we were looking to “The business stake- to Cyara, “we had to actually have individuals achieve, “ says Cronin. manually dial numbers and manually tick off a holders loved Cyara check sheet,” he says. “You know did it do this? CYARA OUTBOUND TESTING™ TESTS AND because it was Did it answer? Was this script played? If I press REVEALS ISSUES WITH IMMATURE CALL this button, what was the response? Cyara PROGRESS DETECTION SOFTWARE essentially the first automated a bunch of that, so it saved on the NAB also used Cyara Outbound Testing™, time they’d seen the time of doing that testing,” says Cronin. which tests outbound dialers and voice callback solutions by receiving calls, to test customer experience Each business unit within NAB has its own outbound collection calls made by one of the written down, full needs in terms of business verification testing business units. and while there was some documentation for stop, in one place.” these requirements, there was no central “Tuning of the call progress detection or the repository of information,” says Cronin. answering machine detection system is key to Graham Cronin its success in working properly, and NAB had Head of Network Services “Cyara centralized the testing process with done quite a lot of tuning on the older version their repository (the Cyara Platform™) of what of software,” says Cronin. NAB used a new the system should look like before and after version from their existing call progress changes were made --from the customer’s detection software vendor when they moved point of view -- which is unique to Cyara,” says to the new IP telephony infrastructure. Cronin. “This new version caused lots of problems as it REDUCING COSTS AND MITIGATING RISK OF was not as mature as a previous version; Cyara CUSTOMERFACING APPLICATIONS Outbound Testing™ enabled us to catch a few Security, bottom-line focus and mitigating risk things early which was good,” says Cronin. are cornerstones of the banking industry. “We are a bank, so security and reducing risk are “When it comes to outbound it was beneficial top of mind for us,” says Cronin. “Testing, to have Cyara; the Cyara people helped us reducing risk and cost savings were where tweak the system for it to work in Australia, in Cyara really helped the project succeed,” says our environment and for the collections Cronin. business in particular. The technology was helpful, but the support in particular was most “NAB used Cyara to simulate what the end helpful in that regard,” says Cronin. game would look like in terms of load and traffic and the number of calls and message and system performance required. Being able to simulate and do forward-looking testing in terms of the end-to-end systems before going live was critical given the quite complex group of technologies that we put together,” explains Cronin.

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BUSINESS UNITS’ BUYIN KEY TO SUCCESS the flexibility in going forward with further Critical to the success of the entire consolida- testing as needed. “As the program scope tion effort of the VCCI project was getting the changed slightly, Cyara changed with it,” says different business units on board with the Cronin. project, says Cronin. “They were very comfort- able because of what Cyara revealed to them But most important “was the approach that about their own customer experiences,” he Cyara brought to the table in becoming part of says. the project community and looking at it from what we needed to get done; being adaptive “The business stakeholders loved Cyara in their approach to our needs and making because it was essentially the first time they’d sure deliverables were completed in the time seen the customer experience written down, frame to meet our expectations,” says Cronin. full stop, in one place,” explains Cronin. “Many “Cyara just made the whole experience of of the business stakeholders inherited legacy getting to where we are today a lot easier and operations with no consolidated view of all of a lot more effective.” the phone numbers coming into their operation, all of the IVR experiences, all of the music, the persona of the experience, the details around how calls went from A to B,” says ABOUT NATIONAL BANK OF AUSTRALIA Cronin. National Australia Bank Group (the Group) is a financial services organization with over 12 “They now have visibility of what customers million customers and 50,000 people, operat- are actually experiencing. Prior to Cyara, it was ing more than 1,750 stores and service centers a matter of them having to dial the number globally. The company’s major financial HEADQUARTERS themselves and going through the experience services franchises in Australia are comple- Level 40, 140 William St. manually. That is really difficult to do when mented by businesses in New Zealand, Asia, Melbourne, VIC 3000 you're talking about dozens or hundreds of the United Kingdom and the United States. Australia phone numbers with combinations of IVR Tel: +61 3 9607 8304 structures and in locations all across the whole Fax: +61 3 9889 2119 setup,” says Cronin.

NORTH AMERICA In summary Cronin says “I like Cyara because ABOUT CYARA 1 Sansome Street, Suite 3500 the business likes Cyara. Some of the Cyara is a pioneer of next-generation premise San Francisco, CA 94104 comments we've had from the business and cloud-based solutions for simulating, USA leaders are ‘thank goodness for Cyara,’ so it just testing and monitoring IVRs, voice biometrics, Tel: +1 (415) 946 8861 made that whole business engagement side of outbound dialers, voice callback and other Fax: +1 (415) 946 8801 things a lot easier because of the confidence it contact center systems and applications. Cyara gives the business. What we're actually doing is tests end-to-end contact center customer and EMEA verifiable. It’s written down. It's proven,” says agent experience in a repeatable, automated Level 17, Dashwood House Cronin. “It's a consensus of the testing. It's from manner and ensures exemplary system 69 Old Broad Street the customer side of things and the business operation, emulating live calls without London EC2M 1QS likes it. Therefore, it's good.” requiring or impeding live customers United Kingdom or agents. Tel: +44 20 7256 4170 Cyara’s commercial flexibility was also a benefit Fax: +44 20 7256 4122 to NAB, says Cronin. He cites ease of use; the way Cyara fits into the NAB environment and For more information: [email protected] [email protected] Cyara Solutions is a registered trademark of Cyara Solutions. Any other trademarks, trade names or service marks mentioned in this document belong to their respective owners. The material presented herein is based upon information that we consider reliable, but we do not represent that it is error free and complete. [email protected] Cyara is not making any representation or granting any warranty with respect to such material, and the distribution of such material shall not subject Cyara to any liability.